They should look to Red-state North Dakota for a more hopeful approach.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems to believe that the future of law enforcement is in the past. During a speech to law enforcement officials last month, he talked up the “new challenge of violent crime” and the need to put “bad men behind bars." Presumably he meant more bad men, since plenty are already incarcerated; just as he presumably meant the “new challenge of peacefulness,” since violent crime is near record lows. But never mind pesky facts, Sessions is determined to be every bit as tough on crime and bad hombres as his more colorful boss.

On the same day Sessions gave his speech, a federal judge in Honolulu tossed out President Trump’s revised travel ban, provoking Trump to complain, “This ruling makes us look weak.” That most experts think Trump’s measures have nothing to do with protecting America is beside the point. This is a man, after all, who loudly insisted last year that five men, four black and one Latino, exonerated of assault on the basis of DNA evidence should be imprisoned anyway. None of this has anything to do with public safety.

This is the Trump administration doing its best to look like Richard Nixon. In 1968, while running against Hubert Humphrey, at the height of the civil rights revolution, Nixon stood up for prejudice and anger. “Doubling the conviction rate,” he declared, would reduce crime more than quadrupling funds for the war on poverty. Subsequent presidents doubled down on Nixon’s formula.

So the number of people in prison nearly quintupled between 1980 and 2010; and the number in federal custody increased nearly nine times over, making us a country that houses roughly a fourth of the world’s prisoners — and giving rise to an inevitable question: Is it really possible that America has one-fourth of all the world’s bad hombres and that therefore our approach make sense?

My quest for answers took me to Berlin, where I visited prisons with landscaped grounds and humane prison officials determined to help inmates adjust to the world most will one day re-enter. A few months ago, I visited prisons in Norway, which locks up only a fraction of the number, per capita, America locks up and strives to treat those imprisoned with dignity and respect.

Norway took a hard look at how it did things after experiencing violent prisons incidents in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The result was a prison system that eschews harsh treatment but attempts to prepare people to be good citizens. The time spent serving a sentence is invested in “rehabilitation, with activities, with training and education,” Harald Føsker, of the Directorate of Norwegian Correctional Service, told me. A maximum security facility that I visited near the Swedish border looks more like a college campus than a prison, with green spaces, a record recording studio and comfortable workout rooms.

During my visit, I encountered the leaders of an American delegation from the U.S.-European Criminal Justice Innovation Program. That program, funded by Don Specter of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, takes American judges, jailers and other state officials to Norway to show them the Norwegian approach. It started, Specter said, with his own visits to Europe, which left him “kind of shocked” at how humane and effective policies in certain countries there seemed to be. Dr. Brie Williams of the University of California, San Francisco, and a leader of the U.S.-European program, pointed me toward North Dakota when I asked whether there was an America program actually tying to follow in Norway’s footsteps.

Prior to visiting Norway as part of the 2015 delegation, “I really wasn't expecting to be as moved by what I saw,” recalled Leann Bertsch, director of the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. But Bertsch was stunned and returned to North Dakota intent on seeing if Europe’s methods could work for her.

Over the past year, North Dakota has radically reduced the numbers in solitary confinement: “We were at about 100 … we're right now in the 30s,” she said. North Dakota also upgraded conditions in its minimum security facility, making prisoners more comfortable and more autonomous, even allowing them to cook some of their own meals. Prison guards were told to be sociable and less confrontational.

Erion Peltier, now in his early 40s, told me he had been in and out of prisons for some 20 years. It started with stealing cars but his fights in prison significantly added to his time. He is currently serving an additional five years for striking a corrections officer who, in his telling, hit him first. Peltier has noticed the change. Instead of harassing him, he said, corrections officers are now friendly. “They kind of get you thinking about good stuff instead of just being mean.”

Bertsch concedes that North Dakota, with an incarcerated population of roughly 1,800, is different than states with huge incarcerated populations, but "How you treat people is universal. People respond to kindness with kindness. People respond to violence with more violence.”

Bertsch doesn’t see the rise of the Trump administration (and North Dakota overwhelmingly voted for Trump) as cause for concern. “When President Obama was in and taking a much different approach, no one listened to him,” she said. She doesn’t think local officials will pay any more attention to Trump. “Federal policies do have an impact but … I don't think they're as great as some people [think].”

Time will tell whether Bertsch’s optimism is justified; but where Trump and Sessions offer only anger, dishonest preconceptions and discredited ideas, she offers hope. And it’s far past time to give hope a chance.

Ellis Cose, senior fellow in residence at the American Civil Liberties Union and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors, is the author of numerous books, includingThe End of Anger. Cose is now on Twitter @EllisCose